The Microkernel Experiment is Going On

This article is a response to an earlier article by Miles Nordin in Linux Journal, where he expressed his personal feelings about microkernels and monolithic kernels. We will try to present a different point of view. Of course, we are also biased, as we are both young hackers who try to turn the GNU Hurd into a software useful for everyday-work; for those who don't know it (yes, we're abusing this article as an advertisement): The Hurd is a collection of Daemons, currently running on top of the Mach microkernel and providing a replacement for the Unix kernel together with the GNU C Library.

Miles Nordin claimed that microkernels are dead already. But this is not completely true. The first generation of microkernels, which were in fact no real microkernels, are dead. But there is a new generation, which uses a radically different strategy than the original (so-called) microkernels. Thus, microkernels are still a research topic, and today they look more promising than ever before. By now, this is just something we claim, but read on, and you'll find out why we do so.

Out of our own experience, we can confirm that the first generation microkernel
Mach is quite slow, but being microkernel independent is one of the goals of
the Hurd and people are already working on porting the Hurd from Mach to the
second generation microkernel L4. Those new second generation kernels aren't
as slow as Mach and we think that one should not talk about the performance of
microkernel based systems without having read at least some of the papers on
L4. The L4 people did some interesting benchmarks, which indicate that one can
get a lot of performance by making a microkernel really small. How is this
supposed to work? Well, the microkernel provides very primitive, highly
optimized operations, and applications use them to implement whichever way of
inter-process communication is apropriate for them in an efficient way. By
deciding this on a per-case basis, you get optimal performance for all
applications.

But L4 takes this even further. For example, you can have schedulers in userspace. Therefore you can use a scheduler which is optimized for the specific tasks your system performs. With the Linux kernel, different schedulers are only possible by using a different source tree, thus you cannot switch at run-time and/or have different schedulers for different groups of processes.

Of course, microkernels still have some problems, mainly because we are bound to today's technology, and current processors have not been designed with microkernels in mind. On a processor that is not optimized for systems with monolithic kernels, where the currently still problematic overhead of context switches would vanish, microkernels would get another performance boost. This sounds like an excuse, but it is intended as a reminder about the fact that the problem is not the general concept of microkernels. However, the L4 people have done a lot of good hacks to work around all this and have reached reasonable performance already.

All this could be discussed in arbitrary detail, but we won't do that now, as we have more urgent things to do than reacting on FUD about microkernels. So we will conclude by saying that it is too easy to claim that one design is fast and the other one is slow, but everything depends on how exactly a system is designed and implemented. Maybe microkernels will eventually turn out to be slower in almost any case; we doubt that, but who knows? But even then, a microkernel based system will offer enough other advantages so that people will prefer to use it in some cases. But on the other hand, history has shown that new concepts seldom replace old ones completely, but rather establish themselves in addition to the old ones, therefore we will have the opportunity to argue about which concept is best at least for another couple of years.. or decades?